Zonal Safety and Particular Risk Analysis for Aircraft Conceptual Design

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Safety Assessment is paramount in aircraft design, and increasing aircraft complexity has led to the need for aircraft safety assessments in the early design stages. For unconventional aircraft or aircraft with novel propulsion or system technologies, it becomes even more critical to investigate safety as early as possible in the design process to avoid unfeasible aircraft configurations and system architectures. In this context, the Particular Risk Analysis (PRA) and the Zonal Safety Analysis (ZSA) are essential to assess early. Both of them require a three-dimensional (3D) model of the aircraft and systems. To analyze many aircraft configurations and system architectures, the 3D parametric model and the PRA and ZSA require automation. This paper reviews methodologies for performing the ZSA and PRA from a systems point-of-view and proposes parametric zone definition, identification of risk zones, and a conceptual level analysis of the component placement strategy. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a main landing gear ZSA and a tire burst PRA case study for a conventional aircraft. The presented work is a step towards integrating system safety analysis into multidisciplinary analysis and optimization environments, thus increasing conceptual design maturity and reducing development time.